OTTAWA — Tuesday had a whiff of revolution about it. A question period that actually produced real questions!

The Senate internal economy committee, meeting in public! For the first time in who knows how long, there was a sense that somewhere, someone in Ottawa might be held to account for their actions.

Don’t get too excited. We are a long way from true accountability. Question period can be a useful instrument, particularly as it seems to be one of the few means of getting anyone to go on the record nowadays. But its ability to get at the truth remains distinctly limited, even when led by as skilled an interrogator as Tom Mulcair.

As for that committee hearing, for all the revelations it contained — the expression “triple-dipping” appears to have been invented to describe what Mike Duffy was up to — it raised as many questions. Why did the committee only catch these now, and not before, when it signed off on a much more, shall we say, discreet accounting of his misdeeds? Indeed, it appears he was caught, time and again, by Senate staff, who disallowed many of his claims — yet no penalty followed, nor were any flags raised. Why not?

And of course, where was Mike? It is absurd enough that the same committee that whitewashed the original report on Duffy’s expenses should have been entrusted with its revision, but for Duffy, after demanding a public inquiry into himself, not to show up for the occasion — well, it’s either chutzpah or its opposite.

Neither should too much importance be attached to the committee’s decision to refer the whole business to the RCMP. The force does not actually have to wait for an invitation from a Senate committee to investigate matters of alleged fraud. The suspicion lingers that, at least on the government side, senators were only too happy to be able to say “it’s with the police now, I can’t comment,” much as, in the Commons, the ethics commissioner’s investigation has served as a convenient excuse for ministers to evade questions.

If I sound skeptical that much will come of either, I’m not the only one. In the last week we have heard from a former senior RCMP inspector expressing doubts that the force has sufficient independence from its political masters to investigate this thoroughly and impartially — which should be a shocking charge, but sadly isn’t — as well as a warning from the ethics commissioner herself not to expect too much of her inquiry, given her narrow terms of reference.

In addition, we have had complaints from three separate legal or regulatory bodies — the CRTC, Elections Canada and the Federal Court — over the Conservatives’ refusal to co-operate with, or indeed outright obstruction of, their investigations into various robocall abuses. The most serious of these, it has now been established, would have required access to the Conservatives’ closely guarded voter database. Yet in the face of what would appear, in the best case, to be a massive breach of security, the Conservatives have not only taken no action to find those responsible, but have done their best to frustrate others from doing so.

Which may suggest the real stakes here. The government’s multiplying, metastasizing scandals — from Duffy’s improper expense claims to the efforts, apparently coordinated between the Prime Minister’s Office and senior Tory senators, to cover these up, to the robocalls affair, to the arrest on charges of fraud and money laundering of Arthur Porter, the prime minister’s choice for chairman of the Security Intelligence Review Committee — are not, in my view, wholly unrelated. Rather, they stem from a culture that has taken root among the Conservative hierarchy — a culture of expediency.

People don’t make ethical choices in isolation. They take their cues from those around and above them. Maybe Duffy’s expense padding had its roots in the Senate’s historically lax culture: indeed, given the absence of controls on senators’ expenses, it would be astonishing if only a couple of senators had succumbed to the temptation this presented.

But the efforts to cover this up, like the obstruction of the robocalls investigation or the curious lack of due diligence in the Porter appointment, are suggestive of something else: a habit of looking the other way at bad behaviour, if not actually encouraging it; and, when it is brought to light, of denying, and minimizing, and explaining it away.

This isn’t about a few senators padding their expense accounts, or criminal acts on the part of one or two individuals, or even what the prime minister knew when. It’s the whole moral code of this government that’s in question. This isn’t just a problem, something to be fixed — it’s existential. Whatever the various official investigations may or may not turn up, questions about the government’s character are now deeply planted in the public mind, in a way it shows no sign of being able to deal with, or even comprehending.

Indeed, if you want to know how a government gets into this kind of mess, you’ve only to look at how it tries to get out of it. The government persist in thinking this can all be treated as a matter of spin and bluster, much as it has dealt with most problems.

But you can’t spin your way out of something you spun yourself into. If you are generally perceived as devious and duplicitous, more deviousness and duplicity are not going to help. Only transparency and honesty can. But, as I’ve said before, if that were what this government were about, we wouldn’t be here.

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